Wed­ded to their MBA stud­ies!

WHEN Jas­myin Petrinna Tay Sue Lin and Siew Weng Lee un­der­took the Ed­in­burgh Business School Mas­ter of Business Ad­min­is­tra­tion (MBA) pro­gramme, they had the per­fect study part­ners – each other!

The mar­ried cou­ple be­gan their stud­ies in Jan­uary 2015 and both sat for their fi­nal exam in Au­gust 2016.

Jas­myin, who will soon work as an IT Pro­cure­ment An­a­lyst for Vil­lage Road­show Ltd, a lead­ing in­ter­na­tional en­ter­tain­ment com­pany, and Siew, a con­tract en­gi­neer with Shell, chose the Ed­in­burgh Business School pro­gramme be­cause it specif­i­cally caters for work­ing pro­fes­sion­als.

Jas­myin says study­ing to­gether made the sac­ri­fices eas­ier. “It gave me more mo­ti­va­tion to go to classes, know­ing we were both with­out our week­ends be­cause of the pro­gramme. We were able to ex­change ideas and talk to twice the num­ber of peo­ple and then share that ex­pe­ri­ence with each other,” she said.

Jas­myin moved com­pa­nies twice dur­ing her stud­ies but the flex­i­bil­ity of the pro­gramme en­abled her to con­tinue study­ing and she is cur­rently liv­ing in Perth, Western Aus­tralia be­fore start­ing her new job in Mel­bourne, Vic­to­ria.

“I was able to im­ple­ment much of what I’d learnt from Project Man­age­ment and Or­gan­i­sa­tional Be­hav­iour espe­cially. I was also able to put into prac­tice all the strat­egy mod­ules I had taken when I was in a man­age­rial po­si­tion with WWF Malaysia, the en­vi­ron­men­tal and con­ser­va­tion or­gan­i­sa­tion,” she said.

Siew wanted to broaden his business knowl­edge by tak­ing an MBA, as he comes from an en­gi­neer­ing back­ground. He will join Jas­myin in Aus­tralia when his con­tract with Shell ends in De­cem­ber: pro­grammes. Some ex­ec­u­tives take an MBA as a glo­ri­fied net­work­ing tool, ex­pect­ing to meet peo­ple who can open doors for them, or pro­vide them with cap­i­tal to start busi­nesses. While there is plenty of op­por­tu­nity to net­work, the EBS MBA is for those who are in­ter­ested in the sub­ject mat­ter of business ad­min­is­tra­tion, but trea­sure their flex­i­bil­ity. The con­tact hours are ar­ranged to pro­vide min­i­mal in­tru­sion into per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life. How­ever, the same flex­i­bil­ity means great dis­ci­pline will be re­quired as no one is go­ing to make you study,” he said.